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Away with Words
Movie

Away with Words

1999 • Unknown

Woke Score
6
out of 10

Plot

A Japanese man and a gay bar-owner in Hong Kong drink beer as they talk about their childhood and experiences.

Overall Series Review

This experimental drama follows a Japanese wanderer with synesthesia named Asano, who finds a temporary home in a gay dive bar in Hong Kong owned by a disaffected Australian expatriate, Kevin. The film is less concerned with plot than with visual aesthetics, philosophical musings on memory, displacement, and the sensory experience of language. The narrative is a series of abstract vignettes and inner monologues from the main characters, including the bar assistant, Susie. The core of the movie is the experience of alienation and the search for an authentic, self-made meaning in a fluid, post-modern global setting.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics5/10

The film’s central cast is naturally diverse, featuring Japanese, Australian, and Chinese main characters whose experiences focus on the universal themes of loneliness and displacement, not systemic oppression. However, the one prominent white male character, Kevin, is explicitly a bumbling, beer-soaked expatriate with memory issues who is often depicted as needing to be collected and cleaned up after by the other characters, giving a subtly negative portrayal relative to the more functional Asian characters.

Oikophobia6/10

The central premise revolves around characters who are 'out of place' and 'without a home,' having chosen to abandon the regulated, mundane lives of their respective cultures for an abstracted existence in a global city. This strong theme of displacement and a preference for rootlessness deconstructs the value of heritage and stable institutions, viewing home life as something to be escaped for greater personal experience.

Feminism4/10

The main female character, Susie, is a competent worker and fashion designer who functions as the capable anchor of the group. She is consistently shown cleaning up and managing the fallout from the two chaotic, memory-addled male protagonists. This dynamic mildly inverts traditional roles by positioning the woman as the responsible figure contrasted with the male incompetence, although the character is secondary and the narrative does not focus on a political 'Girl Boss' thesis.

LGBTQ+7/10

The primary setting for the film’s intimate, philosophical discussions is a gay dive bar in Hong Kong, and one of the two core protagonists, Kevin, is explicitly a gay bar-owner. This choice places an alternative sexual identity and lifestyle at the center of the narrative’s emotional and physical space. While the plot avoids a political lecture on gender ideology, the alternative sexuality is a fundamental, centered component of the story's structure.

Anti-Theism7/10

The movie explores the human need for meaning, truth, and moral structure entirely through the personal, subjective inner monologues of its characters, focusing on memory, sensory experience, and self-made meaning. There is a complete absence of transcendent morality or traditional faith. The world operates in a spiritual vacuum where all truth and values are implicitly relative to individual experience, fully embracing a secular post-modern framework.